Cyber-Progressivist Design

Thanks to Ernie Miller (with much link-love) for following up on my quick musings and frustration over what so frequently strikes me as an absence of a positive, progressive cyber-agenda. It seems that Julia Mahoney has a paper out (haven't read it yet) about this same (?) dystopic vision.

Ernie is absolutely right and fair to point out that there are fires to fight on many fronts:

Part of this is, of course, because even negative liberty has been under constant attack for the past decade. We copyfighters have barely fought off things like the INDUCE Act and Broadcast Flag, which doesn't leave much time for focusing on positive goals.

And he does point out myriad examples, for example of alternative compensation schemes or, I might add, Creative Commons, that represent constructive steps forward.

The main problem, I think, is that most people really don't care about copyright; they don't realize how important to a democratic culture it is. We don't lack for potential progressive prescriptions. We lack agreement on them and we lack the marketing.

While I don't disagree with this statement and the shared belief that there's a lot of work to do to make clear how fundamental the rights and liberties at stake are, I still want to emphasize that having a progressive agenda is not the same as having shared values or belief in the First Amendment, the flourishing of creativity or innovation. The frequent problem, in my view, is not one of ends but of the means to them. The prevailing ethos in many of the most committed circles is that to leave well enough alone is the best route. Or perhaps the only route in an environment in which we only have the resources to fight off proposals like the Induce Act and no time or energy left to create a New Deal for Cyberspace.

Leave well enough alone is not the same as the "market will fix all" for these same people are the ones who teach the rest of us that we have more to fear from private corporations than from government (or at least as much). Nonetheless, there are tremendous impediments -- time, money, marketing and an enormous chasm between the libertarian and the communitarian cyber-ethos which transcends technology and goes straight to one's vision of the good life.

But, the remedy, as I see it (because it's what I enjoy and do best) is not to be found only in pursuing a new legislative agenda. What my earlier post was intended to point out is that technology design itself can be brought to bear to strengthen our democratic culture and its values. By technology design, I am not simply referring to network architecture or an open source back-end. I believe we must exploit the "front end" and the design of the interface to shape social relations. It is the front end, the screens through which we interact, not simply with the computer, but with each other that are the best tools for anyone and everyone to use to encourage more participatory, engaged and deliberative ways of living and working. To foster freedom of expression and creative flourishing, we need to create the tools that enable groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves. Like law, technology, too, determines the roles and rights available to us. But technology also affords us new opportunities for regulating our own social conditions. Technology can make the rules, structures and practices of the groups in which we work manifest and thereby give rise to social institutions.

In fact, the screen, rather than legislation, offers a more flexible alternative that provides choices among the institutions to which we belong. It's a finer-grained tool than legislation and, in some cases, the more appropriate way to realize the shared value, not only of free expression but of diversity.

What do I mean by this? Show me some examples, you say? Stay tuned. This was the subject of my talk on Visual Deliberation at Stanford last week. If I can ever finish this draft on on-line identity that was the start of this rant in the first place, I'll post that.